A prediction : those who have been arguing vociferously for the free admittance of "asylum-seekers" because they come from war-torn African countries will soon cease so to plead., wirtes Kevin Myers.
The catastrophe grows apace there, and the world has neither the room for all those who seek refuge from the barbarism which bubbles up through the continent like lava through fissured tectonic plates, nor the will-power to set Africa right.
Country after country has fallen to tyrants, and all one can do is ask: why? How is it that the continent which can grow three or even four crops a year and could feed the world cannot even feed itself? What has been happening that, despite the expenditure of thousands of millions of dollars in aid, almost every single index of civilisation, from literacy to infrastructural capital investment, is plummeting?
A rough rule of thumb: the gaudier the national flag, the more unstable the country. By that standard, Zimbabwe is doomed, as sure and certainly as every colour in the rainbow is on its flagpole. This process now seems unstoppable - not that any African countries appear to want to stop it. Instead they have all condemned the British prime minister as a racist for denouncing the campaign of murder and brutality which has turned one of the bread-baskets of southern Africa into yet another of its basket cases.
Savimbi and Banda
It is not merely to the homicidal character of Robert Mugabe that we should look for an explanation of why Africa seems doomed, but more to the late Jonas Savimbi of Angola, and before him, to Hastings Banda, of Malawi. Savimbi was a brilliant man, fluent in half-a-dozen languages, charismatic, witty and learned, able to quote Shakespeare and Molière at will. Banda - birth date unknown, self-lettered yet equally brilliant - left his native village barefoot to seek education. By heroic efforts, he made it to the US to study medicine, and later to Scotland.
Both were geniuses - and both impoverished their countries. Savimbi was a psychopathic warlord with insatiable appetites for bloodshed, and Banda - a far less brutal man with far fewer murders to his name - simply ruined Malawi with his semi-tyrannical and hopelessly corrupt one-party state. Yet these were astoundingly talented men who could have risen to the top of any society anywhere in the world. What made them go wrong? And how did they manage to find so many followers who were willing to assist them in bankrupting their countries and their peoples?
Africa's problem is not lack of intelligence, as anybody who has spent time with African children can testify. Their wit, their energy, their inquisitiveness, their insatiable desire for learning, their vibrant cleverness, and most of all their humour are almost unquenchable. Because so many of them are fluent in two, three or even four languages, they have a unique mental versatility. Moreover, they live in a food paradise. These ingredients should ensure a continent of peace, civilisation and plenty; instead it has war, barbarism and starvation.
Charismatic madmen
These are outcomes brought about by kleptomaniac psychopaths who have emerged from nowhere and seized power over most of the continent. Cast your eyes around Africa and ask yourself: which country has been spared the leadership of a certifiable madman? And has it been Africa's misfortune to produce more charismatic madmen, through the hazards of infantile diet or an unusual prevalence of rogue genes, than one finds in most other societies?
Does Africa actually produce more powerfully driven psychopaths and paranoid schizophrenics than anywhere else in the world? And which of us is not afraid of untreated or untreatable mental illness? Is not our instinct to conciliate those with violently troubled minds, and by such appeasement, further encourage? Thus the spiral steepens.
Zimbabwe today, Kenya tomorrow. When will South Africa start the slide down the slipway to irretrievable corruption and chaos, to join that merry throng of African countries already circling through hell? Some say it has already eased its way off its gantry, and is pointing to the dark and murderous waters below, and the only force that is holding it back from that descent of no return is the charismatic goodness of Nelson Mandela. A civilisation dependent for its civility on the survival of one man is no civilisation at all.
Already we can see ominous signs. The South African deputy foreign minister, Aziz Pahad, has called for the South African press to stop "demonising" Robert Mugabe during the recent election farce. Today he calls; tomorrow, does he order, and the day after that, does he then jail? The head of the Nigerian observer team insists that the election was peaceful, free and fair. That's right, and Gwyneth Paltrow is actually Jomo Kenyatta, brought back from the dead.
Milliionaire ministers
African politics, corrupt anyway, have been further addled by foreign aid and native AIDS. Is there a single African country without its full quota of UN agencies, NGO aid agencies and unpayable foreign debt? Is there a single African country in which government ministers are not all millionaires? (Zimbabwe's cabinet members have $55 million in their own names in Swiss banks alone.)
So now with the election done, tremble for Matabeleland, where Mugabe brought fire and fear a generation ago, and where the boys his Tenth Brigade left alive are now vengeful young men. But tremble also for all of Africa, with its ceaseless diet of war and sorrow and disease, and ask the question for which there is no answer: what can we possibly do for the innocent millions of Africa, as calamity slouches towards them?